Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale, was appointed head of Grace Hopper College in 2024.
Professor Moyn joined Yale in 2017 after teaching at Columbia and Harvard. He is an intellectual historian of modern Europe and global affairs who has written many books on ethical and political ideas in the twentieth century, and about moral revolutions such as the coming of the international human rights movement. His most recent books are about the attempt to make warfare more humane and about Cold War theories of freedom and its enemies. Professor Moyn is working on new projects on court reform in the United States and on gerontocracy, the political empowerment of the elderly.
A recipient of the Mark van Doren Prize for undergraduate teaching at Columbia, Professor Moyn has continued to offer undergraduate classes even while making the transition about a decade ago to teaching law students. He regularly teaches “The World circa 2000” with Professor Dan Magaziner in the history department, and “The Crisis of Liberalism” with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat and Professor Bryan Garsten of the political science department.
Professor Moyn is a self-taught baker who looks forward to sharing his cooking experiments with Hopper students. And to help him work off the sugar intake from trying his own desserts, he is an amateur but avid tennis player. Please request any desserts or offer to play tennis!
Alisa Berger, associate head of Grace Hopper College, is executive director of Deeper Learning Dozen, a public-school innovation project based out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has extensive experience in public and private education, having founded and led several schools in the New York Public School system, and worked at the district level on school reform. Coauthor of How to Innovate: The Essential Guide for Fearless School Leaders, she attended Barnard College and earned her master’s in business from Georgetown.